In this study I examine the construct of aptitude in learningChinese as a second language (L2) to an advanced level. I test 2 hypotheses: first, that L2 aptitude comprises 4 components—working memory, rote memory, grammatical sensitivity, and phonemic coding ability—and second, that L2 aptitude affects learning both directly and indirectly (mediated by strategy use and motivation). Native speak...

This paper describes the systems developed by PUC Minas and IRISA for the person discovery task at MediaEval 2016. We adopt a graph-based representation and investigate two tag-propagation approaches to associate overlays cooccurring with some speaking faces to other visually or audio-visually similar speaking faces. Given a video, we first build a graph from the detected speaking faces (nodes)...

the purpose of this study is designing a model to determine important factors on export performance (ep) in the base of cost leadership strategy for non_ metal mineral industry of iran. in this paper, available approaches in the scope of determinants of ep are identified consist of contingency view, relational and resource based view. in this study, we examine relationship between resources, co...

This paper assesses the ability of a HMM-based speech synthesis systems to model the speech characteristics of various speaking styles. A discrete/continuous HMM is presented to model the symbolic and acoustic speech characteristics of a speaking style. The proposed model is used to model the average characteristics of a speaking style that is shared among various speakers, depending on specifi...

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that some of the items included in the Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment Reading Subtest favour certain cultural groups. For example, it was posited that Mandarin speakers, who have a tendency to use bottom-up, local reading strategies, would perform better on particular questions than Arabic speakers, who tend to use topdown, global readin...

This paper presents an approach to realizing various speaking styles and emotional expressions using a model interpolation technique in HMM-based speech synthesis. In the approach, we synthesize speech with an intermediate speaking style between representative speaking styles from a model obtained by interpolating representative style models. We chose three styles, “reading,” “joyful,” and “sad...